by Comm, Joel
The fees for those kinds of ads vary. A 125 x 125 pixel text ad costs $91 for a week’s placement. A 300 x 250 graphic ad costs $1,560 for 60,000 impressions, the minimum number that Federated Media will sell.
In addition, the site also offers a number of reports. These are carefully researched information products that include profiles, stats, and case studies. The prices start at $300.
If all of that isn’t enough, ReadWriteWeb has also created a number of separate channels, including ReadWriteEnterprise for businesses and ReadWriteStart, which profiles start-ups and entrepreneurs and is sponsored by Microsoft. They’re both accessible from ReadWriteWeb’s main site and show one way in which it’s possible to expand a successful site into new areas and still cash in on its brand.
ReadWriteWeb started small, as a way for a professional technology expert to share his expertise with a wider audience, but it’s now grown into a publishing company in its own right. It’s still run by Richard MacManus from his home office in the New Zealand town of Lower Hutt.
ORIGAMI BLOG
So far, we’ve seen how it’s possible to turn a passion into a profitable online business venture. We’ve also seen just what can happen when you put your business knowledge on the Web and use the tools available to monetize it: You can end up running a successful, specialized publishing company.
But what happens if your passion is your profession?
First, you’ve already hit the jackpot. There aren’t many people who are lucky enough to make a living doing the things they love to do. If you’re one of them, then you’re in select company—and the Web can help you squeeze even more revenue out of your pastime.
Cindy Ng has a degree in business economics, but her real enthusiasm is for paper folding. She designs origami kits and has crafted origami-inspired jewelry that is sold in a number of museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian, and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. She’s also the author of Girligami, a series of origami models designed to appeal to women (Figure 8.4).
Figure 8.4 Origami Blog helps designer Cindy Ng promote her book and her designs, turning her passion into her profession.
Origami Blog (www.origamiblog.com) is just one of Cindy’s web sites, but it acts as a main entry point, attracting people interested in the topic and then sending them out to other sites where they can buy her products. There’s no third-party advertising on the site. That’s a missed opportunity. Blended into the content, there’s no reason that AdSense units, for example, would put off readers or look out of place. Instead, at the top of the page, Cindy places links to her “shop,” Origami Bijou (www.origamibijou.com); her book, Girligami (www.girligami.com); and her online store at Etsy, a craft site where people can buy her origami kits. She also links to her social media pages on Facebook and Twitter, which helps her to build a community around her interest and her designs.
This is a different way of monetizing information compared to the examples we’ve seen before. Cindy’s goal isn’t to earn income from views of the content she posts but to position herself as an expert on origami and to earn direct income by selling products. It’s a method of using specialized content—in this case, content that’s both a hobby and a profession—to build an audience and guide that audience to places where they can make purchases.
Affiliate-Supported Sites
The content-rich sites we’ve looked at so far use a number of different methods to turn information into cash. Sometimes they’ve included affiliate links as one of those revenue channels. When TravelsWithSheila.com discussed cheap ways to travel, for example, the article included an affiliate link to a recommended travel service. But affiliate links aren’t always appropriate on every page. Sales usually rely on recommendations for specific products, so if you’re not discussing a product, then an affiliate link will often bring limited results.
On the other hand, that does mean that sites that focus on products can really cash in with affiliate relationships. In this section, I describe how a couple of sites use affiliate products in two very different ways.
TELESCOPE REVIEWS
Telescope Reviews (www.telescopereviews.org.uk) is exactly what you might expect of a site optimized to make money from affiliate products. Based in the United Kingdom, the site offers “unbiased reviews” of a wide range of telescope brands. But you have to look for those reviews. Surf to the home page, and the first thing you’ll see is three navigation tabs leading to “home,” “cheap telescopes,” and “cheap binoculars.” To find links leading to reviews of different brands or models, readers have to scroll past the ads. This is a site in which selling, and leading people to buy, comes before the content.
Beneath those tabs is a long list of Amazon affiliate links. To the right, an Amazon widget allows the site another opportunity to earn from an affiliate sale. You have to scroll about half a dozen screens before you see the end of the affiliate list and reach the first review.
What the site calls “unbiased” actually means impersonal. There are no accounts of the writer using the telescope, what he or she finds interesting about it, or why it marks a development in home-based astronomy or the science of peeking at neighbors. Instead, readers receive a long, detailed list of features ... followed by a box filled with affiliate links.
There are a lot of sites like this on the Web. Publishers know that buyers research major purchases online before parting with their cash, so creating a review site looks like an easy way to earn a commission on those sales. But while it’s possible to make some money surrounding related words with affiliate ads, to make real money—the kind of money that makes the whole thing worthwhile—the content still has to be good.
The content on Telescope Reviews isn’t good. It looks like it was thrown together by a five-buck-an-article content writer in Ban-galore. It’s unlikely that anyone seriously interested in buying a telescope is going to hang around long enough to decide to buy, and they certainly won’t come back. Whatever the publisher is saving on writing expenses will go to pay for search engine optimization and traffic generation to keep people flowing through.
It’s much easier to produce good content about products related to a topic that interests you. Use that content to create a community, build trust, and bring readers back, and you’re much more likely to see them clicking through your affiliate links and sending you money.
DIGSDIGS
If Telescope Reviews is a good example of how not to create an affiliate site, DigsDigs (www.digsdigs.com) is an excellent example of the right way to make the most of the opportunities provided by affiliates (Figure 8.5).
The site offers information about home decorating and interior design, a field rich in potential affiliate sales. But it doesn’t rely on affiliate sales and it doesn’t shove affiliate links forward at the expense of good content. Instead, the site offers the kind of content that creates desire and provides a way for readers to satisfy that desire by making a purchase.
That also means making the most of other revenue streams. Telescope Reviews places an AdSense half banner above each article, but the units are not well optimized and are easily ignored. DigsDigs uses a horizontal link unit directly beneath the navigation bar and has changed the color of the links to match the color of the site’s own links and headlines: an attractive purple (Figure 8.6). That’s smart blending. The ads now look like content. There’s an image ad on the right, and more square units can be found above each article and sometimes between the images contained within articles, a placement that’s close to impossible to miss.
Figure 8.5 DigsDigs writes about products, but offers much more than reviews, recommendations, and affiliate links.
The result is lots of ads about a range of different household topics, but they aren’t obtrusive and they don’t feel like they’re being pushed on the reader. That’s certainly true of the affiliate links. These don’t appear in every article, even when the post is discussing a product.
That makes for some smart choices. DigsDigs talks about products as wide-ranging as designer bathtubs and elite coffeemakers. Many of those products are going to be interesting but produce few sales. Others are fun and practical and cheap enough to be an impulse buy. If it’s commercial enough to be on Amazon, there’s a chance that a reader will be interested enough to snap it up. That’s when DigsDigs tends to include affiliate links.
Figure 8.6 DigsDigs is a great example of the right way to do an affiliate site.
The site produces content that’s interesting and attractive. It’s designed in a way that makes it a pleasant read, with pictures that allow for quick browsing and fun viewing. It also has a Twitter timeline that enables it to build the base of a community, members of which are likely to click through the links and make money for the publisher.
DigsDigs isn’t obviously a product site. But when it discusses products, it’s already built up enough trust and interest to have a good chance of turning those mentions into affiliate sales.
Information Products
Information products come in a range of different forms and play a range of different roles in the Internet businesses of entrepreneurs. For some publishers, they might provide nothing more than a little supplementary income, an extra revenue source on a site that makes most of its KaChing from advertising. For others, they’re the main deal. The web site helps to promote those products and build a brand.
BRAD CALLEN
Brad Callen might not be long out of his twenties, but there’s little he doesn’t know about Internet marketing. He has his own software company, Bryxen Software, and he’s produced a series of information products about a variety of different aspects of online marketing. If you visit his site, BradCallen.com (www.bradcallen.com), you’ll see that the entire first screen is taken up with plugs for one of his products and notifications of two others that are in production (Figure 8.7). Choose to ignore those ads—and that’s not easy to do—and when you scroll down the page, you’ll see a list of testimonials, then some solid blog content packed with great information. The first item in the navigation bar leads to products, not content. Brad is focused on selling goods, either software products or information products.
The differences between those information products are interesting, too. SEO Mindset is a physical book delivered by mail. It’s also free. Instead of generating a KaChing from the cover price, Brad uses the book to lead buyers into his search engine optimization membership site. Readers get a month’s free membership but must then pay a monthly fee of $39. They can cancel at any time, even before they’ve made a single payment, but Brad is confident that having tried it for a month, most will stick around.
Figure 8.7 On Brad Callen′s web site, information products come first.
His information product then becomes an incentive for an even more lucrative revenue channel.
That’s not true of his other products. Press Release Fire is a traditional e-book that sells for $19.95 and is promoted through a hard-hitting traditional sales page. You can see it at www.pressreleasefire.com.
Elite Sessions consists of 90-minute audio interviews, complete with PDF transcripts, with 11 leading marketers. The discs sell for $147. There was no writing involved here. Brad just sat and talked with a bunch of other experts about a topic that they all know and understand. There’s no easier way to turn information into KaChing.
The only ads on Brad’s site are for his own products. There are no AdSense units and no affiliate links. Instead, his blog posts show off his expertise, enabling him to create a brand strong enough to encourage people to pay for his information, especially after they’ve been persuaded by a powerful sales letter.
BLOOM BIKE SHOP
Brad Callen uses information products as a way of creating large amounts of passive revenue. But that’s not the only way to use information products. You can also produce something very simple and, instead of selling it, use it as a way to market your site, build your brand, and create your e-mail list.
That’s what BloomBikeShop.com (www.bloombikeshop.com) does. The site provides useful information about bicycle repair and maintenance, including tutorials and articles. It monetizes those articles with AdSense units above and below the posts, with CPM banner ads, with affiliate links in genuinely informative product reviews, and with links to shopping sites (Figure 8.8).
It also offers a free e-book to anyone who agrees to register for the site’s e-mail newsletter. That allows the site to keep a list of its visitors and to send deals and offers to anyone who has visited the site in the past, even if they haven’t come back.
Figure 8.8 BloomBikeShop.com provides a ton of information about bicycle maintenance... and uses an information product to capture e-mail addresses. Couldn′t be simpler!
The e-book itself is nothing grand. Called 7 Common Bike Repair Mistakes That Most Riders Make, it lists a number of myths that bike owners believe when they try to repair their own bicycles. With little more than 1,000 words of content, it could easily have been put on the site and made available as Web content like all the other articles. Instead, publisher Levi Bloom has turned it into a PDF document and placed it behind a registration barrier. If you enter your e-mail address, you’ll receive a double-opt-in confirmation message from AWeber. When you confirm your address, you’ll be given a link to a page that lets you read the PDF file.
It’s very easy, couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to put together, and it’s likely to have had a massive effect on the value of the site’s e-mail list.
Subscription Sites
Subscription sites are often relatively complex. They aren’t necessarily difficult to build; the tools available now mean that you have to put in some effort, but you don’t need a degree in computer science or a giant sack of cash to pay a programmer.
What you will need is a community of knowledgeable people who are active on the site and generous with their advice. You also need to be willing to put in the effort to keep the conversations ticking and ensure that the site continues to deliver value for the subscription fee. That can involve anything from starting your own discussion streams to getting rid of people who are rude to other contributors. Subscription fees usually keep out the worst types, but you do want to keep your site a pleasant, helpful place for everyone.
WEBMASTERWORLD
My own subscription site is pretty complex. I’ve packed in a ton of features in my aim to overdeliver. But a subscription site doesn’t have to be that complicated. WebMasterWorld (www.webmasterworld.com) is essentially a forum, and for a long time, it was a free forum (Figure 8.9). When it came to monetizing the site, there was a problem: A forum is a place for open discussion, and those open discussions often involve criticisms of the companies advertising on the site.
Rather than attempt to censor discussions, WebMasterWorld instead chose to ask members to pay a subscription fee of $89 for six months or $149 for a year. The hope was that the value of the sometimes technical information on offer would more than pay for the cost of the subscription.
Some of the older threads can be read for free. They act as sources of information, inviting potential participants in and demonstrating the quality of the knowledge on offer. But to start a thread or to take part in one, users have to sign up.
There are a couple of points to note here.
The first is WebMasterWorld’s simplicity. There are no whiz-bang features. Subscribers are paying for the chance to access each other’s knowledge. That’s all. The site provides a means for them to do that.
Figure 8.9 WebMasterWorld gives some content away for free. The rest you have to pay for.
The second point is that WebMasterWorld depends on its users not just to pay the subscription fees, but also to deliver value for those fees. The site was free for a long time and built up a solid reputation long before it started charging. For a subscription site, that level of trust is vital. People need to know who you are before you can ask them to start
paying a subscription fee.
Branding
Building a brand is more of an art than a science. Successful brands have understood the messages they want to communicate and the tools that they want to use to broadcast those messages. It’s a process that takes time, but one that should end with the customer recognizing the seller’s name and understanding that the company is reliable and trustworthy.